Books at Duke University Press

Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History
Ann Laura Stoler

568 pages (April 2006)
6 b&w illustrations

Cloth - $99.95	0-8223-3737-1
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3737-9]

Paperback - $26.95	0-8223-3724-X
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3724-9]

A milestone in U.S. historiography, Haunted by Empire brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies. The contributors to this innovative collection examine the critical role of “domains of the intimate” in the consolidation of colonial power. They demonstrate how the categories of difference underlying colonialism—the distinctions advanced as the justification for the colonizer’s rule of the colonized—were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the bedroom to the classroom to the medical examining room. Together the essays focus attention on the politics of comparison—on how colonizers differentiated one group or set of behaviors from another—and on the circulation of knowledge and ideologies within and between imperial projects. Ultimately, this collection forces a rethinking of what historians choose to compare and of the epistemological grounds on which those choices are based.

Haunted by Empire includes Ann Laura Stoler’s seminal essay “Tense and Tender Ties” as well as her bold introduction, which carves out the exciting new analytic and methodological ground animated by this comparative venture. The contributors engage in a lively cross-disciplinary conversation, drawing on history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and public health. They address such topics as the regulation of Hindu marriages and gay sexuality in the early-twentieth-century United States; the framing of multiple-choice intelligence tests; the deeply entangled histories of Asian, African, and native peoples in the Americas; the racial categorizations used in the 1890 U.S. census; and the politics of race and space in French colonial New Orleans. Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, and Nancy F. Cott each provide a concluding essay reflecting on the innovations and implications of the arguments advanced in Haunted by Empire.

Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Laura Briggs, Kathleen Brown, Nancy F. Cott, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, Martha Hodes, Paul A. Kramer, Lisa Lowe, Tiya Miles, Gwenn A. Miller, Emily S. Rosenberg, Damon Salesa, Nayan Shah, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ann Laura Stoler, Laura Wexler

“This powerful collection of dazzling essays offers essential reading for our times. It shows us historically how the vast geopolitical movements of empire and globalization rely on intimate recesses of everyday domestic life at home and abroad. It demonstrates the urgency of understanding the long history and geographical reach of the American empire through comparative and transnational perspectives.”—Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

“Haunted by Empire brilliantly illustrates how power plays out in the management of bodies, sentiments, and desires. Readers interested in how attention to the intimate is reconfiguring both U.S. history and postcolonial studies and illuminating the convergences between the two will treasure this rich and provocative book.”—Jacquelyn Hall, Spruill Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies and Chair of the Anthropology Department at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule and Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (also published by Duke University Press), and a coeditor of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.

See Reviews

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Ann Laura Stoler/ Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen

2. Ann Laura Stoler/ Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies

Convergence and Comparison
3. Damon Salesa/ Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison

4. Warwick Anderson/ States of Hygiene: Race “Improvement” and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines

5. Nayan Shah/ Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers

6.Shannon Lee Dawdy/ Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-To Manual from Colonial Louisiana

7. Tiya Miles/ “His Kingdon for a Kiss”: Indians and Intimacy in the Narrative of John Marrant

Proximities of Power
8. Lisa Lowe/ The Intimacies of Four Continents

9. Kathleen Brown/ Body Work in the Antebellum United States

10. Martha Hodes/ Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890

11. Laura Wexler/ The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904

12. Gwenn A. Miller/ “The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy”: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784-1821

Circuits of Knowledge Production
13. Alexandra Minna Stern/ An Empire of Tests: Psychometrics and the Paradoxes of Nationalism in the Americas

14. Laura Briggs/ Making “American” Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S. Latin American Policy

15. Paul A. Kramer/ The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Pilippine-American War

16. Emily S. Rosenberg/ Ordering Others: U.S. Financial Advisers in the Early Twentieth Century

Refractions
17. Linda Gordon/ Internal Colonialism and Gender

18. Catherine Hall/ Commentary

19. Nancy F. Cott/ Afterword

Bibliography
Contributors
Index